YouTube Video Growth Spurt: Just In Time to Play With the Big Kids

On Monday YouTube announced that their standard video player will get bigger. The YouTube page size has been increased to 960 pixels, which by my calculations puts the new player’s width at around 640px. This will allow for more video size options for their users and it will move the video sharing giant closer to wide screen capabilities. Wide screen has been a commonly requested featured on YouTube, now that wide screen monitors are becoming increasingly popular in the consumer market.

The increase in size will most definitely aid YouTube in their future competition with sites like hulu as they begin to add full featured movies and television shows. That’s right, if you haven’t heard yet, MGM has signed a deal to be the first movie house to post some of its best work on YouTube.

It appears that for now the YouTube embeddable player will continue to stay at its 425×344 standard size, which is optimal for adding videos to blogs or sites.

But don’t get too excited, it’s important not to forget that with this new size comes new screen real estate for potential advertisers. As YouTube continues to experiment with various advertising methods you can almost bet that this new screen with will play into new advertising options in the long run.

So head over to YouTube, and give the new size a test drive, then come back here and let us know what you think!